Dear friends,

We hope that these few lines will find you fit and ready to enjoy the arrival of spring.

Here, the last few weeks have been a bit wet, which has done a lot of good for the vines, which hadn’t really seen water since December, despite some nice morning mists.

Since our last email, things have moved on!

First, we have our brand new logo, which we are happy to present to you exclusively:

A big thank you to Isla Abelin, the great designer behind this logo, but also the labels of our future bottles.

As for the work, four old concrete vats have been pierced and reunited to make an original place to store our wines once they have been bottled; and a small flat, located just above the cellar, has been refurbished to be able to receive our visitors.

As far as the vines are concerned, we have chosen to delay pruning as much as possible to try and avoid budburst too early and thus fight (a little) against the risk of spring frosts. While many winegrowers start pruning in November or December, we concentrated our pruning on the month of March alone. It must be said that this is an easier strategy for us to adopt because the areas to be pruned are small. In any case, as of last week, all the pruning has been completed, and we have made considerable progress in anatomy: we now know where the carpal tunnel is located, and how to quickly and inexpensively cause inflammation of the nerve that runs through it. Those who wish to make the same progress should not hesitate to contact us, we are happy to provide secateurs for next year, in all sizes. And when we say “all sizes”, we mean it…

All that remains now is to attach the rods of the Guyot pruned vines to the supporting wires.

In the vineyard, fertiliser (organic, of course) was spread on all the plots.

From next year, we will also be able to count on two new plots of vines that we have just bought in order to expand our future range of white wines. They are planted with Viognier, a grape variety that we love for its aromatic richness, with yellow fruit and flowers, and for its texture on the palate, which is fat, supple and of great finesse. These two new plots will not be classified as organic immediately, as there is an administrative deadline to complete the conversion to organic farming, but you can be sure that, as of this year, we have worked them and will work them in exactly the same way as our other plots, which have all been organic for a very long time.

Finally, to conclude on the subject of vines, another plot, small and fallow for many years, has just been lovingly prepared to receive in a few weeks (if all goes according to plan from our nurseryman…) a plantation of new white grape varieties, typical of the Languedoc, which will give wonderful grapes in a few years.

The more we taste the wines of the Languedoc, the happier we are with our choice: this wine region is full of surprises and produces magnificent wines.

As far as we are concerned, the 2021 production was relatively small due to the major frost episode last spring which severely limited yields, but we are confident that it will be larger in 2022.

That said, while volumes were low in 2021, the quality of the grapes was indeed there

Last week, we submitted our wines – successfully ;) – to a whole battery of analyses and tastings to obtain the authorization to market our bottles under the protected geographical indication Côtes de Thongue, and… we are now ready for the excitement of our very first bottling. We will (finally!) be able to share with you the fruits of our labour over the past nine months.

As we announced in our previous e-mail, this year we will be able to offer you four wines:

– a white of black (Hammurabi),

– a rosé (1134), and

– two red ones (In limine and Pro bono).

We won’t tell you more for the moment, by deliberate and totally assumed choice… because we will present you very soon our website, for the moment in the course of creation (there too, things are progressing well), on which you will be able to find a lot of information on our small domain and on our wines (the meaning of the names we have chosen for them, the way they have been elaborated, their organoleptic characteristics, the blending options, etc.)

We look forward to introducing you to some of the wines we are very pleased with. We really hope you like them, we put a lot of heart and especially a lot of ourselves into them.

In a few months, a fifth wine will be added to the range: it will be blended from two wines that we have left to mature in oak barrels for the time being. And that’s not all, we are also working on other small, unusual products, which we will tell you about in a future e-mail.

In the meantime, we are planning a trip to Paris the week of June 6 to organise some tastings. We hope to use this trip to see all of you who can!

We will tell you more soon.